spiritism
(spiritualism )

Spiritism or spiritualism is the belief that the human personality survives death and
can communicate with the living through a sensitive medium. The
spiritualist movement began in 1848 in upstate New York with the Fox sisters who claimed
that spirits communicated with them by rapping on tables. (The "raps" were
actually made by cracking their toe joints.) By the time the sisters admitted their fraud
some thirty years later, there were tens of thousands of mediums holding séances where
spirits entertained with numerous magical tricks such as making sounds, materializing
objects, making lights glow, levitating tables and moving objects across the room. The
mediums demonstrated every variety of psychic power from clairvoyance
and clairaudience to telekinesis
and telepathy. Repeated charges of fraud did little to stop
the spiritualist movement until the 1920's when magicians such as Houdini exposed the techniques
and methods of deceit used by mediums to fool even the wisest and holiest of men and
women.

The Hollywood version of séances is fairly accurate: people
sitting around a table, holding hands in a darkened room, a faked trance by the medium who
passes on to the group any information given by the spirit, often accompanied by tricks
such as the levitating table, mysterious sounds, materializing objects, etc. For many,
spiritualism was "scientific proof" of life after death, which didn't involve
any of the superstitious non-sense of religion.

Spiritism was and is
a worldwide phenomenon. In Italy,
Eusapia Palladino
was a star medium. In France, Hippolyte Leon Denizard Rivail was the main
promoter of spiritualism. He wrote under the pseudonym of
Allan Kardec and
introduced the word 'spiritism'. In Germany,
Anna Abend gained notoriety for swindling people in many nations. In
Brazil, Chico Xavier
amassed a large following, while claiming to get messages from the dead.
James van Praagh, George Anderson, Sylvia Browne,
Allison DuBois, and John Edward may think they have cornered the market
on the dead, but these folks are tyros compared to Chico Xavier who died in
in 2002 at the age of 92. Xavier published over 500 books of messages from
the dead. Xavier sold 20 million copies of a book of poems he claimed were
dictated to him by spirits. That was in 1932. When he died, his city and
state declared three days of official mourning. According to Ronaldo
Cordeiro (the Brazilian translator of the SD into
Portuguese), letters from dead
people allegedly channeled by Xavier were accepted by Brazilian courts as
valid evidence in at least 2 murder trials.

Progress can be seen
in the history of spiritism. In the beginning, such things as raps and taps
had to be deciphered. Slates and
talking
boards with messages from the dead came next. As detection was
inevitable with any of these cumbersome methods, it soon behooved the
mediums to dispense with all such gadgetry and claim to get messages
directly from the spirits. The messages would either be spoken, as in
channeling, or written, as in automatic writing.